Why we turned off career scores for people in our game credits
Over the last week or so, there has been an enthusiastic discussion in the gaming press and social media about how the Metacritic team collects and displays credits and scores for individual contributors to video games. I want to put our process in context, provide some history, and explain where we’ll be going in the future.
As part of our relaunch of Metacritic in August of last year, one of our goals was to make the site much more dynamic and to allow our users to discover new products by exploring other titles by the creative teams behind the movies, games, TV shows, and albums our users enjoy.
In our movies section, for example, we wanted our users to be able to click on an actor, a director, or writer and view a page dedicated to that individual. On that page, a user can currently view all movies in the Metacritic database that the individual in question starred in, directed, or has written, along with the individual movies’ Metascores, and an overall “career score.” This career score is not an independent evaluation (or an aggregation of reviews of) the individual person in question – it’s a simple average of all the individual Metascores assigned to those movies the individual worked on. We license our movie credit database from our partner IMDb.
Similarly, in our games section, we encourage our users to click on the publisher or developer (development company) of a game they enjoy to learn more about other games those companies have produced, the Metascores of those games, and the companies’ overall career scores.
In addition to creating dedicated pages for corporate publishers and developers, on a given game’s “Details & Credits” page, Metacritic displays those individual people who contributed to the games in our database, including designers, programmers, producers, voice actors, and artists. In turn, we have produced dedicated pages for those individuals featuring their games and associated Metascores, and, until today, their individual career scores.
Although our credits database (which is powered by our sister site GameFAQs) is growing, as our users’ feedback has indicated, it is a work in progress and is not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be to accurately provide a career score for these individuals. As such, we have removed that career score from the pages dedicated to creative individuals behind games on Metacritic. We are still very much committed to building a credits database, and welcome your participation in that process. You can submit information through our sister site GameFAQs here and submit any profile corrections or adjustments here.
